Close
Editor - Ruth Lovering
Gene annotation
Dr Evelyn Camon will be joining the BHF-UCL annotation team for 3 months this year to give our annotation rate a boost. Evelyn is a very experienced GO curator, having lead the GOA curation team at the EBI for seven years. She will be focusing on the annotation of genes involved in the innate immune system, the subject of her PhD. We warmly welcome her to our team.
Based on the EBI statistics, 11th December 2010, this project has associated almost 15,000 GO terms to over 2,000 proteins, 12,000 of which are to 1,400 human proteins.
Gene Ontology
The GOC recently introduced a new ontology relationship 'has_part'. These relationships are currently being displayed in QuickGO, however, this is a complex relationship and the current display can be misleading. The GOC is working on this issue and hopefully improved displays will be available in the near future.
Community annotation
Two UCL teams (comprised of 5 Genetics of Human Disease 2009 MSc students) took part in an annotation competition, CACAO, being run by Brenley McIntosh at Texas A&M University. The competition ran for eight weeks and students had to submit annotations and challenge the accuracy of annotations made by other competitors. We are pleased to announce that the UCL teams were awarded first and third place (out of 8 teams). Team UCL1 submitted the most annotations (over 100), however the UCL team Firefly won by submitting the most correct challenges. The BHF-UCL team would like to congratulate all teams that took part in this very challenging and competitive venture.
We are organising a second 2-day GO annotation workshop in April 2011, there are still places available so please book online if you are interested in attending.
Finally, Texas A&M University are willing to help the BHF-UCL team organise a postgraduate/staff GO annotation competition, similar to CACAO, if you are interested in taking part please contact us.
Grant applications
The provision of high quality GO annotations to human genes is a time consuming activity and many research groups are finding that interpretation of their datasets with GO-dependant software is yielding only broad GO term categories, such as cell proliferation, immune response etc. We would therefore like to offer UCL research groups the option of including a GO curator on future grant applications. For example a GO curator working 1 day a week for 1 year could annotate 50-100 genes, depending on the volume of literature available. This would enable more effective interpretation of high-throughput datasets, as well as contributing to the GOC dataset. Please contact Ruth for more information.
Meetings attended
Ruth attended the Ontology Development and Engineering: Tutorial & Training Workshop at the EBI in October and learnt how to use the GO editorial tool OBO-Edit.
Upcoming meetings
Ruth and Varsha will be attending the Computational Biology Symposium at UCL and the GO signalling workshop at EBI in February and 'remotely' attending the GO consortium meeting in March.
Please register to receive this quarterly Newsletter by email